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John Webber
John Webber John Webber was born in Waterloo, London in the year that Elvis first entered the charts and the Suez crisis began. In the same year, Johnny Rotten, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Jan Peter Balkenende, currently Prime Minister of the Netherlands, were also born, none of whom has yet had a book of poetry published. After an unsuccessful dalliance with Victorian style education at his local grammar school, John’s academic potential was finally stirred by a series of young female teachers at the college of further education which took him in at the age of sixteen. Here he discovered the delights of art and drama and the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, the latter, once explained, appealing to the baser elements of his teenage psyche. His own attempts at poetry at this stage produced no more than a series of dubious limericks however, and he was lured by the more immediate gratification of stage and screen to Reading University, where he embarked on a degree course in Film and Drama. Having spent four years ‘poncing about in make-up and hanging around the student union bar’, as one of his non-student friends put it, he graduated and entered an uncharacteristically responsible period as an English and Drama teacher, also in Reading. The ravages of the Thatcher (spit) era on the teaching profession persuaded him that his destiny lay elsewhere, however, and fate sent him for an interview for a job in IT where he was re-trained in the dubious art of computer programming. Whilst providing him reasonably with the necessary ‘beer tokens of life’, John’s desire to make his mark on the world was never entirely ground down by his office career. Creativity reared its beautiful head once again, and, re-acquainting himself with his volume of Donne, he decided that writing poetry was the way to go. Eventually the poetry magazine Envoi http://www.cinnamonpress.com/envoi/ gave in to his tirade of submissions and published three poems in one edition, thus convincing John that he was on the path to laureate-dom and that he might not have to spend the remainder of his working life grappling only with the latest fiendish machinations of Microsoft after all. Buoyed by this success, he branched out into prose and made an immediate, if hardly noticeable impact on the publishing world with his first book, A Slow Boat to Moscow http://www.wizerd.co.uk/Russia.html, the travelogue style story of his adventures in Russia. Finally the previously disparate worlds of writing and computing came together to form ABCTales http://www.abctales.com and UK Authors http://www.ukauthors.com, the perfect playgrounds for John’s unique skill-set, and he was at last able to fulfil his destiny as barenib, the internet bard, inflicting his now distinctive brand of cyber-performance poetry onto an unsuspecting world wide web. His first collection of poetry, Private Histories, was published by the UKAPresshttp://ukapress in 2004. His next collection, Had Van Gogh Had a Day Job was published in November 2008 by Indigo Dream Press http://www.indigodreamsonline.com/, followed by Stan's Highway, published by UKAPress in 2013. See barenibs.com http://www.barenibs.com for details of all publications. /home/john/Documents/Documents/Poetry/Poetry/Mine/Highway/Times/STAN'S HIGHWAY front.jpg ---- [[Main_Page| Return to Main Page...]] ---- Webber, John